Ascent · Business & commerce
The average gets you read. The supplementary gets you in.
Ontario's business programs are where the written application does the most work. Grades put a student in the pile; the supplementary responses — leadership, initiative, why this program — decide which side of the line they land on.
Commonly required
- ENG4U
- MHF4U — Advanced Functions
- MCV4U or MDM4U, depending on the program
Prerequisites and supplementary requirements change year to year and vary by program. Everything here is orientation — we verify each requirement against the program's current admissions page before your student's list is final.
What decides it
Where the weight really falls.
The supplementary application is the application
Queen's Personal Statement of Experience, Ivey's AEO application, Schulich's supplementary — these are read, scored, and weighted. Students who treat them as a form attached to a transcript are competing against students who spent a summer on them.
Initiative reads louder than titles
A club presidency with nothing behind it reads thinner than a small business with actual revenue, a fundraiser with an actual number, or a job held for two years. Admissions readers see thousands of these. They can tell the difference.
Grade 12 has to hold
Business offers land early and conditionally, and final averages get checked in the summer. A Grade 12 slide is the most common way a student loses an offer they had already been given.
In practice
What Ascent does here.
- Supplementary drafting starts in the summer — early enough that a thin activity list can still be fixed by going and doing something, not just written around
- An honest audit of the activity list: what demonstrates initiative, and what is filling a line
- Balancing direct-entry business against AEO and dual-degree routes, so the list isn't six versions of the same risk
Where students apply
- Ivey AEO — Western
- Commerce — Queen's
- Rotman Commerce — Toronto
- Schulich BBA — York
- BBA — Laurier
- DeGroote — McMaster
Representative programs, not a list to apply from — the real list gets built around your student's grades, courses, and what they want out of the degree.
Other streams
Students often sit across two of these.
Next step
Plan the business application properly.
An Ascent session starts with the transcript and the target, and ends with a written plan for what happens between now and the deadline.
Timing — business
Summer before Grade 12
First drafts of supplementary responses, while there's still time to go make one of them true.
Grade 12 · fall
The program list gets locked and OUAC goes in, with each school's supplementary schedule mapped behind it.
Grade 12 · winter
Supplementary deadlines, and the mid-year marks that decide which conditional offers actually arrive.